The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
CONSTITUTION / UNITED STATES / GENERAL
You ask me in your letter, what ameliorations I think necessary in
our federal constitution. It is now too late to answer the question,
and it would always have been presumption in me to have done it. Your
own ideas, and those of the great characters who were to be concerned
with you in these discussions, will give the law, as they ought to do,
to us all. My own general idea was, that the States should severally
preserve their sovereignty in whatever concerns themselves alone, and
that whatever may concern another State, or any foreign nation, should
be made a part of the federal sovereignty; that the exercise of the
federal sovereignty should be divided among three several bodies,
legislative, executive, and judiciary, as the State sovereignties are;
and that some peaceable means should be contrived, for the federal
head to force compliance on the part of the States.
to George Wythe, 16 September 1787
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